It was well after midnight, but Merlin was still awake.

He propped his back against a doeskin cushion stuffed with straw as he made notes on a wax tablet. Beside him, on a low table, an oil lamp flickered. The remains of his evening meal and a stack of books filled the other side of the table, along with a few scrolls, some of which had rolled off onto the intricately knotted rugs that covered the floor.

The light of the clay lamp barely illuminated the large open space of his command yurt. The yurt was one of his better designs. It had taken his soldiers and craftsmen a few hours this time, and he probably still had a few more iterations before he worked out all of the bugs. Still, the smoke from the low, banked fire in the center was venting properly while still providing plenty of warmth against the mountain chill.

Experimentation, iteration, and careful notes, innovation worked the same in this world as it had in his last, only here it was so much easier. It was like retaking a freshman class, just to pump his GPA.

One of his guards opened the door flap and stepped inside. "Merlinorix, my apologies for disturbing you at your studies, but the scout from the south has returned." The guard, Talico, was a burly man. His Helvetian tunic of bright square patches made him look festive, but the bearskin across his shoulders was reportedly from a beast he had slain himself with a knife. Still, his tone was respectful, and there was a guarded look in his eyes, almost fearful, even though Merlin was unarmed, lower level, and had been a little known fugitive just three weeks before.

"Send him in." Merlin finished the last few observations in his log to transcribe later. He found the act of diagramming and writing by hand helped him think, even if he could just take notes with a thought with his [inscribe] skill. He wished he'd had something like that skill in his old world. Every test would have been an open book exam.

Speaking of books. He reached across the table and picked up one of the thicker codex-style books from the stack. Besides all of the hocus pocus and System prompts, these anachronistic books had been his first clue this world was probably some sort of construct, not a digital simulation, but a poor copy made of regular matter, mostly following the same physical laws and history of his first world, but with a layer of magic and mystery clumsily layered-on. No one used a codex style book like this in ancient Europe, and especially not one with bleached paper that felt like linen. Maybe sheepskin he would have believed, but this was a dead giveaway.

Spotting that lazy error had been enough to encourage him to really dig into this System menu that he had acquired, and it had only taken a few old-fashioned fuzzing tricks to find some very, very interesting things.

A thin young boy in ragged clothes entered the tent. Unlike the guard, there was no sign of fear in the boy's vivid green eyes. There was no emotion at all. He stood, unblinking, waiting.

"You may release that form and report," Merlin said.

The boy's body and clothing deflated, crinkling and contracting with no sign of bones or internal structure of any kind. The pinkish brown flesh grew more yellow and pale as it shrank until it all vanished beneath the chin of an enormous, warty toad. Only the eyes of the toad remained mostly the same, though the pupils were wider.

The toad hopped twice until it was near his feet, then those eyes retracted into its body with the effort of disgorging something. It opened its mouth and dropped a golden glass sphere on the carpet.

Merlin picked it up and brought it closer to the lamplight. At first it seemed clear, then the interior began to grow hazy. The haze grew thicker and stirred like silt in water, beginning to form a shape, like a landscape of trees seen from a mountainside. Small figures moved in the distance. Shapes hung in the air above the trees, one much larger than the rest.

With a subtle shift, Merlin found himself within the scene as if he stood there himself. It was night, but the details were sharp and the colors were vibrant. There was a small Roman army, possibly just one legion near this "Necromancer's Dungeon" he had been hearing about. It looked like they were building a more permanent camp or town there.

He found the skyships much more interesting. They were ridiculously implausible. Shaped like giant imitations of ancient oared warships, the largest had to weigh twenty or thirty thousand tons, yet there it hung in the sky. There was no sign of gas bags, or propellers, or even any exotic lifting technology he might not be familiar with. To move and navigate, it seemed to use rows of big, fan-shaped oars along with sails, of all things. To his trained eye, the technologies on display didn't match. This was a Mad Max sort of retrofit like making a landsailer out of a rusted-out truck frame and tires. He didn't know if the Romans had captured these flying platforms or found them, but it was clear they didn't understand them.

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One more thing he could work with.

He tossed the ball into a sack by his cushion and dispelled the [Infernal Toad] with a wave of his hand. The toad's form swirled like the mist in the scrying ball then dissipated into the air, leaving a scent of sulfur and mud. Rule Two in his personal notes of hard-won lessons on summoning, "Never leave an unneeded summon around to get bored and hungry." Rule One was "Never summon anything you can't dispel." He had learned both the hard way. Some things might be simpler in this world, but it still had its perils.

He called for the guard, "Talico!"

Talico entered immediately and stood at attention, only his eyes moving as he searched the room, probably looking for the now vanished boy, "Yes, Merlinorix?"

"Inform the War Chiefs that we break camp at dawn and head south. It's time to take that dungeon for ourselves." According to the two Fae who had reported the dungeon, the dungeon could be a strategic advantage, if not for the loot, then for the crystal core at its center.

"Yes, Merlinorix!" The guard gave the room one more frantic look then fled through the flap.

It was no wonder the man was shocked. From what Merlin had been able to learn through his experimentation, a summoning like [Infernal Toad] should have been impossible for a wizard, and especially not a third level. Wizards were apparently all about elemental attacks and mana powered physical effects. Summoners were some subspeciality or even a different class altogether. They were rare enough that no one had heard of one outside of legends, at least here among the Helvetians. Maybe things were different in Athens or Alexandria.

He looked at his wax tablet and the sketch he had made there. It had a few annotations, but it was mostly a map of what he had been able to deduce from abusing the System memory. He should get some sleep, but he couldn't resist one more experiment.

Merlin (Nestor Banks) - Wizard Level 3 (257/300)

Mana: 38/38

Mana Recovery: 10/hr

Health: 10/10

Agility: 9

Strength: 6

Constitution: 8

Intelligence: 15

Skills:

Spellcasting - Level 1

Equipped Spells:

Fireball - Level 1

Rejuvenate - Level 1

Inscribe - Level 1

[Rejuvenate] was the key. He selected it.

Spell: Rejuvenate

Rejuvenate allows the caster to transmute mana into health, healing wounds and recovering stamina.

Transmute Mana? Enter the amount or "no" to cancel.

Rejuvenate itself seemed to be a common first level spell. The only reason he could imagine that no one had found its weakness before was that ancient number systems didn't have negative numbers, decimals or exponents. Maybe there was some plan to patch the interface in fifteen hundred years when algebra came along.

"9.999 times ten to the negative 128"

E̵̦͙̹̝̥̾͐̈̈́R̸̳̯̘̃̃̋͜R̵̦̠͚̅̓Ó̶̭́R̸̙̥̋̕:̴͉̱̦̻͇̎̒̆ ̶̯͔̬̰̪̏O̴͙̫͂͜V̶͈̈́̎͗͂͊É̶̡̡͇̃̈̓R̵̢̧̪̹̂͐͒F̵̱̓̔̄̀̈́L̴̺̰̝̗͠O̵͕͇̻̠̰̔̀͘̚W̴̨̥̳̣̙͗͊͒̕

Spell: Summon Floating Horror

The floating horror is not one entity, but a hive organism made up of thousands of infernal [Winged Gullets] in the form of an inverted mountain floating in the sky and covered in crawling masses of these deadly creatures.

Summon Floating Horror? (Warning this will cost -1,000,000 mana). Y/N

The negative mana cost would roll over at his 38 mana limit, either refilling his mana or casting at zero cost. He wouldn't cast it, of course. This was a definite Rule One violation. It did confirm his theory that the 1e-128 region was all infernal summons, just as 1e-64 was various woodland creatures and insects, with the exception of the [Lesser Fire Drake] that had nearly consumed him and half of a village before that unfortunate [Shield Breaker/Champion], war chief had sacrificed himself to stop it.

Merlin had been trying to summon a large bear just to intimidate the yokels, but he had to admit, a fire-breathing lizard the size of a horse had been more impressive.

It had also been the origin of his Rule One. There had been no option to dispel the beast once summoned, which was either some issue with the glitch he was exploiting or a side-effect of the outsize difference in level between himself and the creature.

The [Infernal Toad], although probably far beyond his level to summon, was only a fourth-level creature itself.

He used [Inscribe] to add the new address and description to his System notepad, then he blew out the lamp and settled in to get some sleep, wondering how well a Roman skyship might fare against a [Floating Horror].